Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification (DOCSIS) is a telecommunications standard that permits the addition of high-speed data transfer to an existing Cable TV (CATV) system. DOCSIS is employed by cable television operators to provide data services such as Internet over the hybrid fiber coaxial (HFC) infrastructure. Ethernet Passive Optical Network (EPON) is an optical network architecture based on point to multipoint (P2MP) topology in which a single optical fiber and multiple passive optical splitters are used to provide services from a central office or headend to multiple customer premises. EPON uses a point to point (P2P) Emulation Sublayer to render the P2MP network to appear as a collection of P2P links to the higher protocol layers. A network Operations, Administration and Maintenance (OAM) mechanism is included in EPON to facilitate operations and management of EPON.
DPoE (DOCSIS Provisioning over EPON) uses EPON and a DOCSIS Mediation Layer (DML) solution to provide the translation between the EPON and the DOCSIS back-office systems for provisioning of DOCSIS services.
Certain devices operating in an EPON network may need to operate in either the Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4) mode or the Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) mode.
Improvements to EPON network operation are desired.